Courts Rebuke TSA: Taxpayers To Lose $250,000

“A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

Aaron Tobey claimed in a civil rights lawsuit that in 2010 he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.”

The dissenting judge criticizes Tobey for creating a distraction that could potentially have provided a diversion for “nefarious actors”. But the majority judges saw what is obvious – the distraction wasn’t caused by the honest citizen exercising his rights, but rather, by the heavy-handed government agency violating them. Chalk one up for the little guys.